Use of cellular mobile devices for accessing computer data networks has recently increased dramatically. These mobile devices, often referred to as “smart” phones, provide a platform for both cellular phone calls and cellular-based access to computer data services. For example, a typical cellular radio access network (RAN), which may also be referred to as a “mobile core network” or “mobile core,” is a collection of cells that each includes base stations capable of transmitting and relaying radio signals to subscribers' mobile devices. A “cell” generally denotes a distinct area of a cellular network that utilizes a particular frequency or range of frequencies for transmission of data. A typical base station is a tower to which are affixed a number of antennas that transmit and receive the data over the particular frequency. Mobile devices may transmit radio signals at the designated frequency to the base stations to initiate cellular telephone calls or packet-based data services. With respect to data services, cellular service providers convert the cellular signals, e.g., Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) signals, Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals or Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) signals, received from mobile devices at the base stations into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission within packet-based networks, such as the Internet.
With the increasing use of cellular mobile devices to access packet-based networks, malicious attackers (which may be commonly referred to as “hackers”) have begun to shift the targets of their attacks from more traditional computing devices, such as desktop computers, workstations, laptop computers, and the like, to cellular mobile devices, such as the above-noted smart phones, cellular tablet or slate computers, and cellular e-book readers to name a few examples. The increase in malicious attacks with respect to cellular mobile devices has occurred, at least in part, as a result of users employing cellular mobile devices to access and/or conduct critical financial transactions (such as online banking transactions and/or e-commerce), where the malicious attacks seek to gain access to sensitive user information involved in these transactions (such as usernames and passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive information commonly employed when conducting these types of transactions).
These attacks are commonly deployed using a “call-home” structure, where a malicious program may be surreptitiously loaded onto the cellular mobile devices and then, when loaded, contact a controlling agent that instructs the malicious program on future malicious actions to be taken. These malicious actions not only impact infected cellular mobile devices, compromising their security, but also may impact other cellular mobile devices in that the malicious communications between the malicious program and the controlling agent may consume bandwidth that could be utilized by the other cellular mobile devices for legitimate purposes. Loss of bandwidth may impact user experience and eventually lead to subscribers leaving the service provider that operates the mobile RANs to provide the cellular packet-based data services.